Media identification, particularly identification of financial instruments, such as cheques, banknotes, and giros, is important for automated media validation systems.
An automated media validation system typically receives one or more media items (such as a banknote) and validates whether those media items are genuine. To speed up the validation process, it is more efficient to attempt to recognize what the media item is (or purports to be) prior to validating that item. This allows a one-to-one comparison (between the received media item and a template for that type of media item) to be implemented instead of a one-to-many comparison (between the received media item and each of the templates for every type of media item that can be received).
Recognition of inserted media items is also important because counterfeit media items are occasionally presented to automated validation systems (either inadvertently or fraudulently). It is important to be able to distinguish between (i) a media item purporting to be acceptable to the media validation system, and (ii) a media item not purporting to be acceptable to the media validation system (for example, a media item inserted by mistake, such as currency not accepted by the media validation system). This is because only media items purporting to be acceptable to the media validation system can actually be counterfeits. Some jurisdictions require counterfeit media items to be captured, but there is no requirement to capture a non-counterfeit media item that the automated media validation system does not process.
It is not advantageous to base a recognition system on any of the security features present in a media item (such as a watermark or a magnetic barcode in a banknote) because a counterfeit media item may not have those security features, so it would not be recognized as a potential counterfeit.
At present, typical recognition systems available are either not reliable enough (they do not accurately identify the type of media item sufficiently consistently) or not quick enough at identifying the media item presented.
It would be advantageous to be able to identify a media item being presented reliably and quickly so that if the media item purports to be genuine but is not validated then it can be captured as a counterfeit.